“The Heir of Night” Guest Author Series: Tim Jones

Tim Jones is a New Zealand based novelist and short fiction writer, poet, editor and blogger—but most importantly (to me; I concede Tim may see it differently!), a friend in speculative fiction and one of my first writing contacts in the field. Unfailingly generous and supportive, it is with very great pleasure that I introduce Tim to you today, posting on “Why F-SF rocks [his] world.”

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F-SF Guest Series Post: Tim Jones

The good news is, we’re living in a science fiction novel. The bad news is, it was written by J. G. Ballard.

When people complain that the Golden Age of science fiction never came true, they usually mean that the space programme has devolved to a series of uncrewed robot missions, or that we don’t all have flying cars. But another, slightly later era of science fiction — the era I grew up with — is showing a dispiriting level of predictive power.

I’m referring to the science fiction of the late 1950s through to the 1970s: the social SF of writers like Fred Pohl, Ursula Le Guin and James Tiptree, Jnr, on the one hand, and the British New Wave SF exemplified by J. G. Ballard on the other.

Ballard, that exhilarating, exasperating bard of entropy, turns out to have had sharper eyes than most. The other day, I was looking at images on my computer of housing developments in the US abandoned in the wake of the credit crunch that started in 2008: rows of McMansions, left uninhabited because their owners could no longer afford the mortgage payments, standing empty and desolate, their drained swimming pools filling with leaves.

These were images straight from an early Ballard novel. Of course, the basis for all that imagery was Ballard’s own experience, early in World War II, of being wrenched from a privileged expatriate enclave in Shanghai into Lunghua internment camp, and seeing the world he knew collapse around him.

A counterexample: one of the concepts that excited me most in the SF I read as a youngster was the universal translator, a device that would render any language immediately intelligible to someone who did not speak or read it. Now I have a universal (or close to universal) translator at my fingertips. It’s called Google, and all I have to do is press the “Language tools” link to the right of the search box to access what is (though we rarely think of it in these terms) its quite astonishing power.

Did I get into reading, and then writing, SF because of its predictive ability? Not at all. I started to read SF because it offered an escape from the rigours of life as a young English boy growing up in a part of New Zealand that didn’t have a lot of time for Pommie bastards who spoke funny. I kept reading it, and began to write it, because it spoke to me about my life and my hopes for the future far more directly than any number of novels about status anxiety in middle-class drawing rooms. And I keep reading it today — though my reading has broadened greatly from the days when SF was almost all I read — because the best SF still speaks to my hopes and fears for myself, my family and the world in all the ways that mainstream fiction, for all its virtues, often does not.

That’s why my favourite SF writer over the last decade or so is Kim Stanley Robinson. His best books, notably his Mars Trilogy, bring together everything I have loved in SF over the years: there’s the hard-SF world-building, the fascination with the interaction of characters adapting to a new environment, the politics of inhabiting and organizing a new world, and under it all an enduring sense of wonder at the strangeness and beauty of the universe. That’s the sort of SF I like to read, and the sort of SF that, when I can, I like to write.

Robinson’s hopes and Ballard’s fears. Somewhere in between these two marquees, I pitch my tent.

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About Tim Jones:

Tim Jones is a poet and author of both science fiction and literary fiction. He lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Among his recent books are fantasy novel Anarya’s Secret, short story collection Transported (Vintage, 2008), which was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and is now available for the Kindle, and poetry anthology Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand (Interactive Press, 2009), which he co-edited with Mark Pirie. Voyagers won “Best Collected Work” at the 2010 Sir Julius Vogel Awards.

The thing I love about this blog series you are having Helen is the AMAZING talent that there is in Australia and New Zealand. I am more a fantasy reader and a Sci-fi watcher – but have been thinking lately it is time to start reading sci-fi again.

Tim – I love your post, and thanks for stepping into for me, I wasn’t sure I would be able to make it today due to medical reasons.

I was actually thinking about something similar the other day while watching Star Trek and realised they were carrying around a tablet device that looked a lot like a iPad. And Mobile phones looked a lot like the communication devices that they used in the Original Star Trek. So while we may not have the flying cars and space ports – we have mobile phones, iPad, and I am sure there are a few other Sci-fi inspired things if we look. I heard it said that this is the inspiration of a generation of Star Wars, Star Trek and sci-fi readers and watchers – and I can believe it.

Growing up I clung to Ursula Le Guin like a life-saving raft. Yes, she painted some dark futures, but her sci-fi also has very hopeful underpinnings. Who wouldn’t like to know the Ekumen? Most of all, who hasn’t got a piece of Gethen in their souls?

I’m currently a big fan of Iain M. Banks. I know he’s hit and miss for some folks, but I love the intricacy of his worlds.

There is still time for the Golden Age of Science Fiction to arrive. Even a collapse of civilization could fulfill a Golden Age Post-Apocalyptic SF vision, lol, with or without a Perenno facility to get us out of it. I do prefer Robinson’s hopes to Ballard’s fears, and loved the Mars series, but it is probably more important to read the dystopic stuff in order to get ideas of how to avoid the worst.

Great post, Tim, and great to see the SF flag flying. I’ll admit I’ve always watched more SF then read it (having been brought up on Doctor Who, Star Wars and Star Trek) and I was always entranced by the strange mix of both the alien and the familiar. I’ve always loved SF that posits that this is where things could really go and seeing what that potentially means for the future of humanity.

Tracey and Nicole, it’s interesting that you both said that you tend to be fantasy readers but SF watchers – I wonder if that’s a common experience for people who love the field, and if so, I wonder why that is? (That might make a topic for another blog post someday.)

Mary, I (name-dropping time!) once met Iain Banks, and I really liked him – but, for some reason, I haven’t been able to get into his fiction, with or without the “M.”

Tom, Ballard is a quintessentially English writer from the post-imperial period, whereas Robinson, though some of his work can be quite dark, has that typically American optimism. I was born in England, and when I was younger, it was Ballard and Joy Division all the way (incidentally, Joy Division based song titles on Ballard stories…). I’m less gloomy these days, the state of the world notwithstanding.

Tim, I wonder if it isn’t that so much fantasy movie fare has traditionally been so truly appalling–need I say “Krull” and “Hearts and Armour” as opposed to films like “Gattuca” and “Blade Runner”, which I regard as classics? Generally, I just don’t think film handles “the magic” very well …

Helen, how could you malign “Krull”?! It’s like “Lord of the Rings” reimagined by very silly people who’d never read it! I’ve never seen “Hearts and Armour”, but now I know I will have to look out for it 🙂

You may be right, though.

Alan, from the accents I keep hearing at NZ SF conventions, we are *everywhere*!

OMG – Helen – Krull is one of my favorite movies. And I think you might be right – though I loved Conan the Barbarian series and Krull and the Beastmaster it’s probably more for the cheesy feel than any serious fantasy. It is only recently with Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings that fantasy has bee seriously done well.

I used to read Asimov and KUrt Vonnegut Jr when I was younger. but like Nicole – I definately grew up with Doctor Who, Star Wars and Star Trek and many other

"THE HEIR OF NIGHT by Helen Lowe is a richly told tale of strange magic, dark treachery and conflicting loyalties, set in a well realized world."--Robin Hobb

Thornspell

Jacket art by Antonio Javier Caparo

Thornspell is my first novel and is published by Knopf (Random House Children's Books, USA). It won the Sir Julius Vogel Award 2009 for Best Novel: Young Adult and was a Storylines Childrens' Literature Trust Notable Book 2009.